Obligations
by Coronis
Summary: An unorthodox love letter


*Yuri*  
  
For Rochelle  
  
Obligations  
  
I saw her again today. I see her every day, but somehow today hurt even more than yesterday. I don't know who I think I'm fooling either, pretending I can tell one day from another. I had another argument with the mirror today......that entity who stares blankly back at me through a haze of sun-kissed amber strands at her own slate grey eyes. She never has the heart to argue long though, fresh bruises always swell her mouth shut before she's finished, bitter apples soaked in antiseptic cologne, and her eyes disgust her so that she cannot face them long. Nobody's ever liked those eyes, especially that old witch. It was a summer day in Junon, a hundred halogen stars tanned us in melanomas and fooled us into thinking we could actually see the sky. I was fetching fish or some trivial thing, when an old woman thrust a shrivelled finger in my direction and cried,  
  
"Mako!", it was like someone had incanted an apocalyptic curse, the way those ants all scattered away from me, refusing to take my money or my innocent smiles. What was wrong with me? The old woman visited my mother, asking how she could have let the scientists do such a thing to one so young. I'm not as young as I look. I wish some days that I didn't heal so damn quickly, that way these badges of blood-swollen honour would attest to Tseng's anger for longer than a day. I have obligations to the Shinra, but I have always known that I will soon lay down my life at her command. It's like living in a prison of ice, knowing you'll die soon and accomplish nothing. Anyways.....oh yeah, the witch.....she asked my mother what dire mistakes she must have made, to which the aging whore replied noncommitally that it was my own fault for staying alive, then sucked down another handful of Prozac. She's right. The old lady left me to the fester in that seething sewer of spite, but not before nailing a crucifix to our front door. I ripped it down with my bare hands and burned it in the yard, a blazing testament to all the writhing rage that kept me breathing. I guess I shouldn't have, because all my actions accomplished was reinforcing her primitive vision of me as some kind of demon, but when I get pissed off I do stupid things. Like earn more of these repulsive purple pus-sacs that hang from my eyes whenever I correct my superiors, or fall in love for real.  
  
Soothe my bruises with your radiant smile, my rebel enchantress. My angel, she stares at me with eyes like huge scorched satellites, beautiful dead planets whirring constantly in their own liquid space. She asks me stupid questions about the things I build, the guns, the blades and the engines that have made my hands rough and callussed, and my haunting eyes prematurely weak. I do not mind any of the adverse effects though, I thrive on the mechanical life I breathe into everything I touch, as though each were some beloved sick puppet and a substitute for the fruit of a womb long since crushed by his boots. She calls me, "Sir", and truly believes me to be a man, which is precisely what I intended, but I'm starting to think that was pathetic of me, erecting (do pardon the pun), a screen of lies to protect myself from her homophobia and at the same time letting myself taste just enough of her company to kill me, but never satisfy me. She is so spectacular though, if you saw her you'd understand why any time with her is sufficient to sustain even so pointless a soul as mine. Tseng can't ever know. If he found out he's do worse than kill me. He'd tell her, and that would take away my only reason for living. Hojo already made it so I can't be quite so easily killed, a subtle blond-headed cockroach, you might say. By fucking my mother, twenty-two years ago. Once. ONCE!! And I had to choose that moment to take form.....I had to crawl forth from whatever primeval cocktail of fetid sex fluids that spawned me, right fucking then. But my life is worthwhile, don't you see? Because even I take the secret to my shallow self-made grave, I got to love you.  
  
Are you proud of what you do to me? No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't raise my voice at you, princess. Although something inside me burns to know, does it turn you on knowing that some androgynous ghost knows every flick of your hair, every slant of an eyelash that could steal the heart of whomsoever it pleases? I know every rivet of your gloves and every soft curve nature lavished upon so fortunate a goddess as you. How can you not see such love as you wash down the drain each time we say goodbye? Talking to you exhausts me, my paragon, as though you sense the aching rhythm of my heavy dead heart and delight in it, feed from it even, knowing that an occasional glimmer of hope is all you need to give to keep me in slavery. You and Tseng are all I know, and you force me to live day after day in the hope that some day, one of you will love me. Either, I don't care, you both batter me senseless at every encounter; Tseng with weapons and Tifa with words, but if only one of you loved me, not this rotting genderless waif screaming at the mirror, me, Elena.  
  
  
  
~fin~  
  
Please review  
  
Coronis 


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